


Pretty Diamonds In the Sky

by oonaseckar



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, criminal Malcolm Reynolds, police officer Simon Tam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26427241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Mal is an intergalactic jewel thief.  Simon is an intergalactic cop.But it's a little more complicated than that.
Relationships: Malcolm Reynolds/Simon Tam
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

You could say that Mal is a prisoner of love. Certainly he's a prisoner, at any rate. Since his crime –- or the crime that he was captured and incarcerated for –- he's been secreted away at the pleasure of the High Council commission of the Senior Interspace Federation. He hopes they enjoy it, too, he hopes that they derive some pleasure at least from it. Somebody should. Anhedonia has been his perpetual state for the past eight months, three weeks, four days, seventeen hours, forty-two minutes...

His home now, at the mercy of the hospitality of the Federation, is a space pod that orbits perpetually around one of the many moons of the smaller Lios planet in the Forster nebula. More controllable, isolated and profitable than a communal prison, the only contact he gets with his fellow prisoners is watching other pods circle out the window, as they orbit the moons, hop the barren planet, fade and wither and die of hopelessness, rot quietly in their forgotten gaols. No audio, no signal: just dried-out food pellets spat out of the autoserver every four hours, recycled water on tap, and a strictly limited selection of federation-approved media on the antiquated battered vid-console. And that's it: no home, no family, no mercy and no prospect of relief.

No company, no entertainment, no appeal system, no booze, no _fun_.

No women.

No _men_.


	2. Chapter 2

Maybe he should be grateful: the judge who banged the gavel from his vidlink and sentenced him to a number of years in this arid little egg in space, she thought so. No capital punishment for non-violent crimes in the Federation, no hard labor, no prison yard with gangs to avoid, no temptation to recidivism due to fraternization with fellow-crims. (On the other hand, little chance of parole or improving life-chances on release: it's _possible_ to give oneself a basic education and gain vocational qualifications via the vid-console. You can guess how many inmates actually manage it. The lifestyle offers precious little incentive. The loneliness is fierce, depression is rife, suicide attempts for lifers are frequent.)

But he'll be out in a few years, though he'll have lost a fair fraction of his youthful charm and looks by that time. He isn't the violent type: and though as the most notorious –- perhaps he flatters himself a bit –- jewel thief in several galaxies, they had to make an example of him. Still, it's only a custodial sentence.

He doesn't bother with the educational programs, and he barely watches the recreational stuff, silly comedies and the latest Starlife reality-soaps and panel shows. Mostly he reads the classics on the screen, Dostoesvsky and Dickens and Conrad. And other than that, he stares out the thick clear window at the stars, at the green moons of Lios, at Lios itself. At other pod-capsules spinning past, other hopeless tiny stick-men inside counting away days and hours of incarceration.

The stars are beautiful, but they're not as beautiful as the eyes of his lover, Simon.

Or the eyes of the space-cop who put him away in here, for lifting pretty trinkets and interesting tech from the lovely interstellar homes of the galaxy's rich, those who could well afford to lose them.

Actually, the same eyes –- the same person.


	3. Chapter 3

Anyone would tell you –- and especially any of the crowd Mal runs with –- that he should have known better than to get mixed up with an off-duty cop. Mal knew it too, but you can't always make the heart listen to reason, right? What Mal means, it's not as if he even knew Simon was a cop straight off. He didn't exactly _advertise_ the fact, and there was a reason for that. He was undercover, trying to lure in some associates of Mal's who were doing some lucrative business forging interesting Tang-period Terran antiquities, and selling them to rich collectors and universities with valuable collections. Mal was only tangentially involved with the scam, fencing a few minor items here and there, when he had relevant connections.

But now, he guesses Simon had trouble making connections and getting a good contact within the inner circle, so he figured that Mal was the next best thing.

This is his hindsight, of course. So flattering.

No-one could have resisted Simon, anyway -- or at least, Mal certainly couldn't. Not even if he'd known he was a cop that first night, maybe. It was in a bar in the inner asteroid ring of the Burroughs planetary class, second planet in, that superficially served the educated upwardly-mobile hipster element, but had an undercurrent, a hidden regular inner ring of older patrons from the criminal element. And Simon was pretending to be a junior associate archaeology professor at the Institute for Off-Terra Sino-Tibetan Studies on the next planet along, slumming, with a little air of being ready to be corrupted by the right villain. He 'accidentally' bumped into Mal at the bar, looking oblivious and blue-eyed adorable, slight and pretty with an innocent face. He was _actually_ wearing one of those tweed jackets from old Earth, from one of the little Scottish islands. The ones with the elbow patches, can you believe it? And a pair of spectacles in his top pocket, along with a fountain pen and a pocket square. It was shameless. He obviously relished every stuffy academic cliché in the book. Or knew how well it could work on the right mark, perhaps.

And Mal fell for it. Everyone has their type, don't they, and that night Mal discovered what it was, for him. When Simon spilt his drink, a little, he insisted on buying him another, and then a second, and Mal's disreputable buddies teased him about _love at first sight_ and _expensive, high-end tastes_ and such. Then they repaired to a little table in a dark corner, where Simon jawed his ear off about pottery fragments and trans-Himalayan poetry, establishing his professional interest, and that he was _very_ interested in Terran antiquities, and hearing about any dubious, covetable items on the market. But he managed to get the job done quite subtly, and it went under Mal's radar for suspicious maneuvers and fishing for information. Then, anyhow.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn't as if it was the only thing he, they, talked about, anyhow. He liked ballet, and cosy old-Earth mysteries, and the poetry of the far-off Circean sea-princesses, and gardening. Me, my tastes are not so refined: call it bourbon, with none of the mash to chew on in the glass and aged long enough to smell the ethanol, and I won't complain. And phoney wrestling, and trashy women. And sometimes refined, over-educated men, to toy with me a little. But I liked to listen to him, it was pretty to hear him talk, he had a real pretty way of expressing himself and the way his lips moved when he talked or sighed or drank was something that should have had an adults-only rating.

I fell for it that night, and he must have figured that a contact a little distanced from the action was better than none, because he went home with me. I guess he must have been deep undercover, or at least caught up in his acting method and keeping it real, because in my quiet little suburban home –- hide in plain view, keep it respectable or as respectable as you can –- he pulled off that fusty fuddy-duddy old-man professor jacket, and the soft cashmere pullover underneath it, and the prim little blue and white check shirt under that. The expensively unstylish turn-up trousers, the classy brogues. All of 'em toed off, discarded, politely folded and ceremoniously smoothed over the back of a chair, in my carefully anonymous, neutral, tidy bedroom. While I lay on the bed and watched him, and felt a god-damn fire in my crotch, to watch this gentle learned demurely disrobing professor, slowly strip off all the accoutrements that signified his educated, monied, politely upper-class status, and reveal the man beneath.

(Well, I watched him reveal one aspect of the man beneath, anyhow. What I didn't know about Simon that first night, was practically everything that was really of significance, as far as I was concerned. But I enjoyed the night, and him, anyhow.) When I had him under me, squirming and hot-skinned, unbelievably smooth, chest waxed, smiling, teasing, his hands light, touching, tickling –- part of the kick of it was the deception, I have to admit. Oh, I didn't know about him –- but that he thought I was a respectable antiques dealer, with a high-end boutique in a fancypants part of the spiral of stars, another nice civilised charming gay bachelor. When what he actually had in his bed was a lot closer to a panther with a toothache and a bad mood, rather than the nice well-behaved chihuahua he was anticipating.


End file.
